I thhought this was a USA only web site. Send those fuckers back to their shithole country and nuke Europe. They are such arrogant assholes that think they are superior to everyone else in the world. Well sorry buckos.. YOU SUCK.
One thing I put in my own (later) submission of this story, was how the AltaVista announcement here in the UK seemed to spur a lot of other ISPs into announceing toll-free access packages.
Some use British Telecom's "surftime" pacakge but not all. I use "freeserve time" which doesn't go thru BT.
While it's never good for companies to hype away without substance, in this case I think the announcement (in part) led to a more rapid bringing to market of other company's toll-free services, which ultimately benefited the consumer.
It's my opinion that most of the devices we're talking about use the line for short periods, or under user command. So several of them can share one line easily.
I agree though, interesting to see what will happen as single-user (one PC per family) households give way to multi-user ones, where internet surfing devices (i.e. connected much more often and for longer than say a TiVo) are much cheaper. Everyone will want to surf at once, and maybe they will have to go the way of Apple's AirPort or bluetooth or something like that.
Inside the home/small office I really hope to see wires dying out.:-)
Just as radio isn't even a candle to television in any sense.
Do watch TV while driving the car?
Ever notice how TV news stories are 80% told in the voice-over? The pictures are usually either library or establishing shots.. Shut your eyes during the next TV news bulletin and see how much you miss out on.. not much is my guess.
TV and radio are two different media; each has their place.
And here you go again: Reading a good book at a library or perhaps going to a nice play or even opera is better than getting pure music.
Making statements of your opinion as if they are some kind of fact is bogus. Many would disagree with your statement (I would personally), but I wouldn't claim my personal preference was a self-evident truth. You can't prove (or disprove) an opinion, (unlike a belief).
What these new breed of appliances need is bluetooth or some other wireless standard. Wires (like I have trailing around my house too) are a pain. (Literally when you trip over them!).
You'd want some kinda of inter-house broadcast protocol..
: WHO-HAS PERSON-NEAR && CAN-ALERT?
: SEND-ALERT "Toast's up!"
How propriety can it be? It's based on MPEG2 which is a ISO standard...
They're launching the TIVO here in the UK in the fall (or autumn as we call it), in conjuction with a digital satellite broadcaster (Sky). Does anyone know if they are just going to rip the digital MPEG data directly from the DVB multiplex and store it? That would make sense...
Just to redundantly agree... I was recently involved in developing a satellite delivery network with internet return-path; at first we assumed all the receive sites would have permanent internet connection already, due to the market area we operate in, then it transpired some would need dial-up access... then the question was who would they dial (this is a global network, so each country would need a separate ISP at least).
In the end we had to build our application to cope with either scenario - dial-up (which must be managed by our software so it's dialled up at the right times), or permanent connection provided thru the customers network.
For dial-up the customer site must provide an ISP and all the details. For LAN connectivity, they must open some ports on their corporate firewall.
All in all, having just two options doubles the complexity of the project. Every time the software has a new option, it increases the support issues, and the chances of failure.
In a one country market where you can provide a [0|1]800 number, it's much much easier to fix everything in the appliance and then it's plug and play.
Let's face it, the phrases "rebuilding the kernel" or "mounting/unmounting the drives" can sound pretty scary to Joe Microserf; I know they gave me the willies when I was first checking Linux out.
I can remember clearly where I was when I first heard the phrase "rebuild the kernel"! It made me tingle all over with goose-bumps:-) I was like "wow!", that sounds so cool.
Yep me too! On my laptop I simply have/boot and / along with some swap. I keep all my transient data on the server though.
On my home server machine I have 128 M swap, 16 M/boot, 2 G for / and then a separate partion ("/p2") of the rest of the drive where I put the home directories (/p2/home/...) and my equivalent to/usr/local (/p2/local/...). Which means I can upgrade the OS using my preferred technique (format partition, install from scratch).
Got a few production servers at work and I've followed the same pattern here. Once you're using RAID you've lost any physical meaning to your partitions anyway, so I can't see a performance gain - at least how to determine it without a lot of testing.
I've never fathomed how professional website designers check out their work on, say, IE2, IE3, IE4, IE5 without using 4 different PCs
Just curious, anybody out there know how the pro's do it? Or how they run multiple browser versions?!
Short answer.. we don't! Ok I generalise a lot and some other more professional designers will no doubt give their own answer. But I do get paid and part of my work involves designing html for the web, and I gotta admit I just have a look on the lastest versions of IE and Netscape (which can both be installed on the same PC).
A lot of sites these days stipulate a minimum browser requirement.
I use style sheets extensively, and although that means older browsers won't render as I see the pages, it does mean they'll have a pretty good go at making the page readable. The pages have more syntactic meaning and less layout code, which is a "good thing".
I work in satellite televsion. In our industry there is a protection scheme by a company called Macrovision that works in set-top decoder boxes and screws with the output video signal. It does this in a clever way that has little effect on TVs but f**ks up VCRs totally. Which from an engineering point of view is pretty neat; they know how VCRs are designed and they take advantage of this.
Also in our industry is the concept of the "trusted agent". Usually a tamper-proof smart card. This can decrypt programs and can be invidually instructed to do so by remote (encrypted) commands.
Now, combine the two concepts and you have an audio player than can be instructed to decode a certain digital track, when the owner of the smart card pays up. Make the decryption and D/A conversion occur inside the tamper proof hardware. Now the tricky part: in the hardware introduce an impairment to the audio signal.
The trick would be to design this impairment such that when driving an analogue amplification/speaker system, it is pretty much inaudable. But designed such that when the waveform is A/D converted and applied to the MP3 (say) algorithm, the results are bad.
As new bit-rate-reduction algorithms come to the fore, analyse them and update your impairment to take them into account. Do this to the smart-card whenever it's presented to buy music.
Obviously you need to take a big step and stop releasing the tracks in any other format. So you need to make this new format seem really attractive by bundling a whole lot of other whizzy consumer friendly technology in it. CDs took over because the consumer felt they offered a genuine quality improvement. You'll need to get this new format introduced in the same way.
OTOH, nothing will prevent people from taking the trouble to write a bit of HTML and share their head with the net.
But where will they put the HTML after they wrote it? HTML is served from hardware that costs money, using net connectivity that costs money.
If I have a personal web site of limited appeal I can use some free web space my ISP provides. But there are two problems:
If my site proved very popular, my ISP might start to restrict bandwidth to my webspace.
Worse, is my ISP's business model valid long-term? Or is the web space they provide me just a loss leader, an entree into a yet unspecified profit mechanism? Most ISPs don't (yet) make a whole lot of profit, that can't be sustained for ever.
I don't know the answers... maybe look at the world of publishing today - the "establishment" (whether academic or business) decides if information is worthy of publication. I can see that starting to be the case on the net.
Slashdot Mirror
you rather prove our point :-)
Some use British Telecom's "surftime" pacakge but not all. I use "freeserve time" which doesn't go thru BT.
While it's never good for companies to hype away without substance, in this case I think the announcement (in part) led to a more rapid bringing to market of other company's toll-free services, which ultimately benefited the consumer.
I agree though, interesting to see what will happen as single-user (one PC per family) households give way to multi-user ones, where internet surfing devices (i.e. connected much more often and for longer than say a TiVo) are much cheaper. Everyone will want to surf at once, and maybe they will have to go the way of Apple's AirPort or bluetooth or something like that.
Inside the home/small office I really hope to see wires dying out. :-)
Do watch TV while driving the car?
Ever notice how TV news stories are 80% told in the voice-over? The pictures are usually either library or establishing shots.. Shut your eyes during the next TV news bulletin and see how much you miss out on.. not much is my guess.
TV and radio are two different media; each has their place.
And here you go again: Reading a good book at a library or perhaps going to a nice play or even opera is better than getting pure music.
Making statements of your opinion as if they are some kind of fact is bogus. Many would disagree with your statement (I would personally), but I wouldn't claim my personal preference was a self-evident truth. You can't prove (or disprove) an opinion, (unlike a belief).
Never generalise! :-)
I had a look at that site, and OK it's not that pretty, whizzy, scripted or database driven.
The red menu table thing is kinda unpleasant on the eye.
But, it's fast, clean layout, and has the street address, phone number and principal's name for each of the schools. Content is king.
You'd want some kinda of inter-house broadcast protocol..
: WHO-HAS PERSON-NEAR && CAN-ALERT?
: SEND-ALERT "Toast's up!"
They're launching the TIVO here in the UK in the fall (or autumn as we call it), in conjuction with a digital satellite broadcaster (Sky). Does anyone know if they are just going to rip the digital MPEG data directly from the DVB multiplex and store it? That would make sense...
In the end we had to build our application to cope with either scenario - dial-up (which must be managed by our software so it's dialled up at the right times), or permanent connection provided thru the customers network.
For dial-up the customer site must provide an ISP and all the details. For LAN connectivity, they must open some ports on their corporate firewall.
All in all, having just two options doubles the complexity of the project. Every time the software has a new option, it increases the support issues, and the chances of failure.
In a one country market where you can provide a [0|1]800 number, it's much much easier to fix everything in the appliance and then it's plug and play.
33% more time to administrate
I love the word administrate, I find myself using it too.. but I think the right word is administer.
I can remember clearly where I was when I first heard the phrase "rebuild the kernel"! It made me tingle all over with goose-bumps :-) I was like "wow!", that sounds so cool.
Sad thing is I'm not joking.
On my home server machine I have 128 M swap, 16 M /boot, 2 G for / and then a separate partion ("/p2") of the rest of the drive where I put the home directories (/p2/home/...) and my equivalent to /usr/local (/p2/local/...). Which means I can upgrade the OS using my preferred technique (format partition, install from scratch).
Got a few production servers at work and I've followed the same pattern here. Once you're using RAID you've lost any physical meaning to your partitions anyway, so I can't see a performance gain - at least how to determine it without a lot of testing.
Short answer.. we don't! Ok I generalise a lot and some other more professional designers will no doubt give their own answer. But I do get paid and part of my work involves designing html for the web, and I gotta admit I just have a look on the lastest versions of IE and Netscape (which can both be installed on the same PC).
A lot of sites these days stipulate a minimum browser requirement.
I use style sheets extensively, and although that means older browsers won't render as I see the pages, it does mean they'll have a pretty good go at making the page readable. The pages have more syntactic meaning and less layout code, which is a "good thing".
Also in our industry is the concept of the "trusted agent". Usually a tamper-proof smart card. This can decrypt programs and can be invidually instructed to do so by remote (encrypted) commands.
Now, combine the two concepts and you have an audio player than can be instructed to decode a certain digital track, when the owner of the smart card pays up. Make the decryption and D/A conversion occur inside the tamper proof hardware. Now the tricky part: in the hardware introduce an impairment to the audio signal.
The trick would be to design this impairment such that when driving an analogue amplification/speaker system, it is pretty much inaudable. But designed such that when the waveform is A/D converted and applied to the MP3 (say) algorithm, the results are bad.
As new bit-rate-reduction algorithms come to the fore, analyse them and update your impairment to take them into account. Do this to the smart-card whenever it's presented to buy music.
Obviously you need to take a big step and stop releasing the tracks in any other format. So you need to make this new format seem really attractive by bundling a whole lot of other whizzy consumer friendly technology in it. CDs took over because the consumer felt they offered a genuine quality improvement. You'll need to get this new format introduced in the same way.
Where's the holes in my grand plan?? :-)
OTOH, nothing will prevent people from taking the trouble to write a bit of HTML and share their head with the net.
But where will they put the HTML after they wrote it? HTML is served from hardware that costs money, using net connectivity that costs money.
If I have a personal web site of limited appeal I can use some free web space my ISP provides. But there are two problems:
I don't know the answers... maybe look at the world of publishing today - the "establishment" (whether academic or business) decides if information is worthy of publication. I can see that starting to be the case on the net.